A Town Taught Me How to Write a Novel
Although most of my novel Everyday History takes place in Boston, the story has its roots in the beautiful city of Freiburg, Germany, where I lived when I wrote it. Tucked into the southwestern corner of Germany, near both the French and Swiss borders, Freiburg nestles against the baby foothills of the Black Forest mountains. It’s the perfect size of city for getting around easily on foot while still preserving some anonymity.
I moved back to the United States a decade ago, but still consider Freiburg my heart’s home, partly because of the many months, days, and hours I spent there with Everyday History’s main characters, Henry and Ruben, figuring out how to write a novel. Their personalities and trials seeped into the walls of the elegant house in which I lived, providing the perfect place to write.
I found comfort in the fact that the house, situated between a stately school and the train track along the Black Forest foothills, was exactly as old as my mother, who had recently died. The bedroom in which I wrote was the room in which my landlady, who lived in the apartment downstairs, was born (German people tend to stay in one place more than Americans do).
Being surrounded by all of that stability and beauty and groundedness helped me a great deal to find my way with the story. Immersed in so much that was old, I felt capable of exploring something new.
In the later stages of writing Everyday History, I shuffled sticky notes on the side of the wardrobe next the chair I sat in when I wrote, to help me clarify the final order of the scenes. (Click photos to enlarge. Article continues below.)
Freiburg itself makes an appearance in Everyday History. Henry, doing his best to forget about Ruben and move on, takes a trip to Freiburg, where he studied as a young man. Without giving away any more story context, I’ve shared above a photo of a building that delivers a moment of importance for Henry. It’s a real street corner in Freiburg with the words in German for heaven and hell painted on the side of a building.
What led Henry to that moment was a reunion with a little museum in a doorway. The museum exists in real life, but is in Basel, Switzerland—the Hoosesagg Museum (“The Smallest Museum in Basel”). In Everyday History, I moved the Hoosesagg to Freiburg and invented the exhibit Henry saw in the window.
The real Hoosesagg Museum’s website includes photos of current and previous exhibits, as well as photos of the tiny passageway in which it’s located (the website is not in English, but a scroll down the page provides visuals; some English information is here). Those photos give a sense of the atmosphere Henry walked through when he happened upon the museum in the story. The last time I was in Basel, the Hoosesagg showed an exhibit of red toy vehicles. (The white arrow on the door in the photo above points to a button to press to turn on the interior shelf lights.)
When I decided to leave Freiburg and move back to the US, I struggled to give my friends and family on both sides of the Atlantic an understandable reason, because they all knew I’d fulfilled a dream when I moved to Freiburg and loved living there. What I landed on to say that felt and still feels the most true is that “Freiburg has everything I want, except for the things I can’t live without,” which includes my extended family, bookstores chocked with treasures in English, and easier connections with more of my readers and fellow authors.
I don’t yearn for Freiburg anymore, not the way I used to. Maybe, in my completion of writing a novel in collaboration with the spirit of the city, we consummated our relationship.
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Alice Archer is the author of the literary romance novels Everyday History and The Infinite Onion. You can subscribe to her newsletter to receive a free story, notification of new articles and books, and more.
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